Here's Everything We Know About Apple's New Animojis

Sep. 12, 2017

Seriously, Apple does have a knack for knowing exactly what you never thought you wanted. At Tuesday's iPhone X announcement, the tech company announced a couple updates to the new operating system, one being animoji. So what are these animoji anyway? They're exactly what they sound like: Animated emoji that will most definitely take your group texts to the next level. This is some next level stuff. The animoji will use the Face ID scanning feature on the upcoming iPhone X and create custom 3D versions of the emoji based on your own facial expressions.

You might not even need to use a bitmoji anymore when you want to get personal — you can make the cute little monkey face laugh just like you do. Or curse! The possibilities are endless.

The animoji will be available in the Messages app and will be ready to pick up your facial expressions right away. Then you can edit them and send as a message in real-time. Your friends will get them as a looping video with audio, according to The Verge.

From the presentation, it looks like Apple currently has the monkeys, cats, dogs, the unicorn, and poop emoji, among some other essentials, ready to be animated with your voice and facial expressions. So you will be able to actually make the poop emoji say something.

Here's the bad news: going off of Phil Schiller's presentation of the new phones on Tuesday, it looks like the Face ID technology will only be on the iPhone X because you need that 3D camera to make the animation work.

The Face ID hardware is hardcore. The iPhone 8 will still have a home button and a one-touch login option, but the iPhone X gets rid of the home button altogether. Instead of Touch ID, a user will log in with facial recognition. Schiller promised that the Face ID was so sensitive that a new hair cut or glasses wouldn't fool it — or the animoji. “Nothing has ever been simpler or more natural,” he said at the event.

Of course, at the event, Schiller himself had some trouble logging in just using his mug, so hopefully the tech company will work out the kinks before the phones, which retails for $999, hit the market.

Talking poop emoji and facial recognition means that we are definitely living in the the future. In addition to using Face ID for fun, like with the animoji, it will also work just like the Touch ID does now. Not only will you log in to your phone with it, but it will work with Apple Pay and your apps. Basically, anything you can use Touch ID for, you can log into with your face.

It's just as cool as it is just teeny tiny but creepy. According to The Telegraph, Schiller said:

Every time you glance at iPhone X, it detects your face with an IR [infrared] image, the dot projector projects IR dots, the image and the dot pattern create a mathematical model of your face, which is checked against the one you make when you set it up. And it unlocks the phone in real-time.

According to Schiller, there aren't any worries about people breaking into you phone, since the Face ID technology won't be fooled by a photograph (like a kid holding up a family photo to get into your iTunes account) and none of the facial data is stored on a server or a cloud. It's all encrypted on the device, so hackers can't use your likeness to get in.

Or make your animoji say and do things you don't want them to do. Which is, of course, the most important thing.

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